Today, I will be talking about Digital Maturity and how the human factor plays into that Digital Maturity. Because its not just about business or technology. Your desired growth will not be achievable by focussing just on the right technology or the business perspective. Its the people that make the difference.
What is Digital Maturity?
Although there a loads of definitions out there, most of them refer to the ability of an organization to adapt to disruptive trends. For me, Digital Maturity is the capability to leverage your human and technological resources towards increased marketing performance and achieving business goals. There’s three factors that define Digital Maturity within that definition. In this blog, I will focus on the human part of the aquation.
The Human Factor
Instead of just looking at the technical aspect of Digital Maturity, I believe that a big part of your Digital Maturity is determined by humans. Or, to be precise, the ability of your marketing department to:
- Comprehend the impact of upcoming trends
- Translate your business objectives and goals into strategies
- Turning those strategies into actionable plans, campaigns and measurable kpi’s
- Leverage the available technology to reach those goals
Identifying value
Although marketers are considered to be creative and able to work on an abstract level, they will not all have the exact same ability to translate trends into possibilities for your business. Being able to understand the business value of a trend and translating that value into ways to actually improve your positioning, processes or campaigns is proof of existing Digital Maturity. Think of marketers that now leverage ChatGPT to optimize content performance & conversion rates in different steps of their customer journey.
Building the bridge
Same goes for the ability to translate a business objective into a strategy and an actionable plan. Can your marketing department break down an objective into the right stepping stones to achieve those goals? And find the right messaging, channels and audiences to target their efforts on? Doing this succesfully and constantly circling back to review data and optimize conversion counts as Digital Maturity to me.
Align your marketing team
The human factor also comes into play when it comes to the ability to leverage the available technology. What good does a Digital Experience Platform do if your marketers have no clue how to use its features? Or lack the ability to translate business needs into a streamlined process leveraging their existing technology? They need to be envolved in the adoption process of a Digital Experience Platform from the start in order to understand its power and best practices on integrating these features in their day to day activities. Starting with eliminating a third party email solution and switching to the email application in your Digital Experience Platform from the start could be a great stepping stone.
Doing the right thing at the right time
Finally, support your marketing department with their efforts to leverage the out-of-the-box features by creating a roadmap that dictates the order in which features are turned on. A common pitfall for marketers is to get over excited about all the cool stuff they can do causing them to drown in opportunities and lose their way. Match your Digital Maturity with the features your Marketing department can handle today and take it from there. Don’t start sophisticated personalization tomorrow if your marketers struggle with basic e-mail possibilities today. Ease them into marketing automation as a follow-up to reactivate the lost contacts that did not respond to your marketing mail. Try different versions with A/B testing and before you know it, you just levelled up on Digital Maturity.
Are you ready to start growing your Digital Maturity? Take a look at the Digital Maturity Calculator that Kentico developed to get a helpful understanding of where you are today and your best next steps.
Need some personal help based on the outcome of the calculator or want to discuss your specific challenges? Send me a message on LinkedIn and lets talk about it.
About me
Roel Kuik is a Digital Experience Evangelist with extensive experience in digital marketing. Working closely with our clients to identify their marketing needs and develop strategies to help them achieve their goals. He is passionate about sharing his knowledge and our tools with clients, empowering them to stay ahead of the competition and achieve success in their respective industries. Recently he was recognized as Kentico’s Most Valuable Professional making him the first digital marketer to receive this honor.